Key Advisors

Zylö works with a variety of collaborators and advisors, as follows:

Pedro Cabrales PhD is an Assistant Research Scientist, La Jolla Bioengineering Institute, at the University of California, San Diego, Department of Bioengineering. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. His principal focus of research is to advance our understanding of oxygen delivery to tissues and the management of the microcirculation and how this may facilitate the development of blood substitutes that are both efficacious and biologically plausible. His primary area of interest is gas-transport physiology and bioengineering design for development of next-generation blood substitutes; bioengineering microcirculation; the effect of blood substitutes on oxygen transport to tissue. His research work is on the transport of biological gases and their ability to regulate or affect cellular metabolism. His aim is to design novel therapeutic interventions to treat, manage and ultimately prevent disease using an integrative analysis of physical and chemical phenomena, based on engineering sciences principles and methods.

Kelvin P. Davies, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urology and Institute of Smooth Muscle Biology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. The focus of his research has been to understand the underlying molecular and biochemical mechanisms of urogenital and smooth muscle diseases. He is principle investigator on two National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants to investigate the biochemical mechanism regulating smooth muscle tone. He has published over 40 papers in international, peer-reviewed journals and serves as an ad-hoc grant reviewer for the NIH and the Italian Ministry for Health. The basic research approach that Dr. Davies has taken to understanding urogenital pathology was translated into the first-ever clinical trials for a gene-therapy approach to treat erectile and bladder dysfunction. In addition, he is senior author on the seminal paper describing the use of Nanopods™ for the treatment of ED. Dr. Davies received an MSc in Toxicology from Birmingham University (UK) and a PhD from Zurich University (Switzerland).

Joshua D. Nosanchuk, MD, FIDA, FACP is a Professor in the Departments of Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases, Division of Dermatology) and Microbiology/Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is an expert in microbial pathogenesis and is the principal investigator in a National Institutes of Health funded basic science laboratory. Dr. Nosanchuk holds several patents, and an antibody he generated has completed a phase 1a/b clinical trial. He has published over 350 peer-reviewed basic science and clinical papers and several book chapters and is on the editorial board of several journals, including the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Infection and Immunity, Microbes and Infection, and Virulence. He regularly speaks at national and international scientific meetings and is a member of numerous medical and scientific societies where he holds leadership positions. Dr. Nosanchuk is also a senior attending physician at the Montefiore Medical Center.

Mahantesh S. Navati, Ph.D. is presently a senior scientist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and has headed the formulation efforts for Zylö Therapeutics. He is also President and CEO of 3DX-RAY VISION India and a member of the Board of Advisors for Vision Eye Hospital, Karnataka, India. With expertise ranging from nanotechnology to bio-electronics, Dr. Navati has employed a multidisciplinary approach to a variety of formulation and nano-delivery challenges, and his efforts have led to more than 14 patents (issued/pending) and 30 publications. Before he joined the Zylö effort, Dr. Navati was Senior Scientist at Nanocrystals Technologies (New York) and worked for Bio-SPHERIX (Maryland) in collaboration with AECOM. Dr. Navati earned his Ph.D. in Physics in India.

Andrew Draganski, Ph.D. completed his Ph.D. in Food Science at Rutgers where he focused on studying molecular mobility in model biological systems utilizing both intrinsic and GRAS-status optical probes. Since joining Joel Friedman's laboratory at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he has been working on the advancement and further characterization of the lab's novel nanoparticle platform. He is especially interested in the effect of particle size, shape, charge distribution, surface functionalization, drug loading, and pore size on the subsequent interaction of nanoparticles with cells and tissues. In these pursuits a number of microscopy techniques are used prominently: these include multiphoton for studying skin-NP interactions, IVIS for whole-animal imaging, and confocal microscopy for in vitro cell research.

Sylvia Suadicani, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urology and Assistant Professor in the Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Montefiore Medical Center. She is an expert in the area of intracellular and intercellular signaling with a strong background in Cellular Biology, Physiology and Pharmacology. Her research focuses on the investigation of mechanisms contributing to development of bladder dysfunction, particularly diabetic cystopathy, interstitial cystitis, neurogenic bladder in Multiple Sclerosis and spinal cord injury, and Chronic Pelvic Pain. In collaboration with basic science and clinical faculty in the Department of Urology she is also investigating mechanisms whereby the gut microbiome alters urogenital function. Through collaborations with colleagues at Einstein-Montefiore Dr. Suadicani is also expanding her research into the areas of female sexual dysfunction and urologic oncology to better understand underlying pathophysiological mechanisms and identify novel molecular mediators that can be therapeutically targeted.

Claudia Gravekamp, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, and a member of the Albert Einstein Cancer Center. She received her Ph.D. in 1988 in the field of Tumor Immunology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. From 1987 until 1993, she served as head of the Laboratory for Leptospirosis at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. In 1993, she started as a Research Fellow in Medicine at the Channing Laboratory of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, and soon thereafter became an Instructor in Medicine until 1998. There, she developed vaccines against Group B Streptococcus and gained expertise in the design and development of gene-driven vaccines. From 1998 to 2006, she was an Associate Member in the Institute for Drug Development of the Cancer Therapy and Research Center and an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in San Antonio. In San Antonio she began to develop a program aimed at genetic vaccines for breast cancer. From 2006 to 2008, she was a Scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute in San Francisco, continuing to develop novel immunotherapeutic approaches to cancer utilizing an attenuated bacterium Listeria monocytogenes as selective delivery platform for anti-cancer agents, and study their efficacy in preclinical models at young and old age. Some of these approaches are now coming to fruition in her current laboratory at Einstein and beginning to move towards clinical trials. She has been funded by grants from the NIH (RO1, R21, RO3), other grant agencies and private industry since 1999), published 65 scientific articles, is a member of the Editorial Board of Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, and is ad-hoc reviewer for various scientific journals (Cancer Immunology Immunotherapy, Science Translational Medicine, Cancer Research, Clinical Cancer Research, Cellular Immunology, Transplantation, Infectious Disease, Biogerontology, Experimental Gerontology). She has served as reviewer on multiple NIH study sections.